Microsoft Azure Cognitive Speech to Text - recognize dates

Question

Can the Microsoft Cognitive Speech to Text service recognize dates and output the text in a formatted way? For example when input speech is, "date of birth is five fifteen sixty-four", that the text output shows, "date of birth is 5/15/64".

Thank you!

I had created a support ticket with Microsoft and here is their response: ITN (inverse text normalization) is supposed to cover the formatting of various number expressions, including dates and phone numbers. The current technology does well on some types but not in others, especially cases where more contextual cues have to be taken into account to interpret and format properly. The quality is being constantly improved. ustomer can provide any feedback or DSATs that can help us enrich our model training and test sets, for ITN or other features....See my next comment for the remainder.... — Caesar Patel, Dec 14 '18 at 18:06
Response continued...For example, if you try your test case #2 on Win10 Cortana, you will get a nicer format like “You can reach me at 408-555-1234”. This is supported by a newer ITN technology that we’re about to roll out to other endpoints, including Cognitive Services hopefully in the next couple of months. The new ITN still doesn’t seem to capture the phone number in the customer’s example; but one nice thing about the new ITN technology is that it’s easier to train the model with examples to improve its quality. It’s definitely helpful if the c — Caesar Patel, Dec 14 '18 at 18:08

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 19 '20 at 08:46

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When you use Speech-To-Text functionality, you can get results in different formats for a sentence, for example here for a year (1932):

Here is the documentation about each format: https://learn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/azure/cognitive-services/speech-service/rest-apis#nbest

If the output does not fit your needs, I would highly suggest to use a DateTime recognizer (which is used in other solutions like LUIS) from the text that has been generated in STT output. The sources are here and there are packages available depending on your programming language.

edited Sep 19 '20 at 08:46

Martijn Pieters

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answered Dec 05 '18 at 10:46

Nicolas R

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Thank you Nicolas R. We will look into the LUIS to see if it helps. – Caesar Patel Dec 14 '18 at 18:05
I'm not saying that you should LUIS, but DateTime recognizer ! – Nicolas R Dec 14 '18 at 18:51

Microsoft Azure Cognitive Speech to Text - recognize dates

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